PARIS -- Indonesia today presents much more of a threat to
international society than India's nuclear weapons. Indonesia's
crisis could ignite reactions elsewhere in countries suffering
the consequences of unconsidered and unbridled
globalization. India's weapons are primarily a danger to India,
and to Pakistan and China.

International concern about India's nuclear tests is
understandable, but the protests and sanctions of the existing
nuclear powers are politically and morally hollow. An
enormous American nuclear arsenal is maintained today even
though there is no nuclear threat. It could not be eliminated,
or seriously reduced, without provoking congressional outrage
(public opinion itself is a more complicated affair).

India believes that it is threatened by China and Pakistan.
Whether the threats are nuclear, and whether India's nuclear
weapons improve the situation, may be questioned. But India
was invaded by China in 1962, has fought three wars with
Pakistan, and Pakistan actively disputes India's domination of
Kashmir.

The United States has also been a complacent witness to
China's nuclear armament, and American firms have helped
the Chinese develop their missiles. The United States has
silently approved Israel's nuclear armament. Why can China
and Israel have nuclear forces, and not India?

Why are the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China
the authorized nuclear military powers? India's record of fair
elections, democratic government, and respect for human
rights is infinitely better than either China's or Russia's.

We know why: Those five countries already have nuclear
weapons and nothing can be done about it. India has now
played the test card to put itself into the same category. Now
it is part of the nuclear club, even if the others would
blackball it. They can't, because membership is not by
election.

Soon Pakistan will undoubtedly have the weapons too,
following the same logic. And if experience is a reliable guide,
the two of them, and China, will be a great deal more careful
in the future than they have been in the past. It's a funny old
world, as Margaret Thatcher said.

Indonesia provides a bloody and frightening case of what can
happen to a society ravaged by what Edward Luttwak has
called turbo-capitalism, but might better be called
nihilo-capitalism.

I say nihilo-capitalism because unlike what Joseph
Schumpeter described as ``creative destruction,'' produced
by technological innovation in industry, the capitalist force
driving globalism is a destroyer of prevailing values that
substitutes, in John Maynard Keynes' phrase, the values of the
casino.

In the 1920s, Keynes expressed his fear of the moral nihilism
of an unregulated capitalism which makes livelihood and
employment ``the by-products of the activities of a casino.''
Were he alive today, he would find casino values the
international norm, warmly endorsed by nearly all
respectable parties.

What distinguishes Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea from the
other Asian tiger-economies is that their development was
internally controlled and financed, directed by their
governments. They are not casino economies.

In the casino, the rich who can collaborate with foreign
investors are made enormously richer. Foreign investors
ordinarily do very well in a society such as Indonesia's, with
the IMF to look after their interests -- doing so in a manner
which even the Wall Street Journal finds unjust and offensive.

Some poor also benefit. The larger number of them are made
still poorer by the destruction of traditional livelihoods,
uncontrolled urbanization, and what usually amounts to the
rape of national resources. The natural tendency of
nihilo-capitalism is to destroy social structures, tear people
from their cultural roots, and install an impoverishing
internationalization of the consumer market and popular
culture.

While the political protests in Indonesia began with university
students, children of a middle class which largely has
benefited from Indonesia's boom, the consequences for the
poor of the crisis are what now have driven people into the
streets of every major Indonesian city, producing in Jakarta
itself, at the end of the week, what the BBC correspondent on
the scene described as ``a total breakdown of law and
order.''

The Chinese minority in Indonesia, some 7 percent of the
total population, already are suffering badly in these riots
because they are the merchant and financial class.
Long-installed ethnic hostility thus is wedded to class and
economic-based resentment and anger.

This combination was responsible for the massacre of
something like 750,000 people in late 1965, in the aftermath
of a failed coup for which the Chinese were held responsible,
and whose repression set then-General Suharto on the road
to dictatorial power.

So much for the complacent and unhistorical argument made
by a majority of the American policy class today, from the
leaders of the Clinton Administration to those of the
conservative American Enterprise Institute, that globalization
naturally promotes democracy and the defense of human
rights.

Globalized market capitalism is a radical and revolutionary
force. It is more revolutionary in its effects than was Leninism.
Leninism came to power in Russia on the back of the first
world war, installing itself in the ruins of a war-destroyed
Czarist system. Maoist Communism gained power by
attaching itself to the outraged nationalism of the Chinese
people.

War and nationalism were the revolutionary forces. The
globalization of unregulated capitalism ranks with them as a
force in history, and in our common future. Nuclear weapons
are a detail.

5/13/98:
Negotiating in reality, not
wishfulness 5/7/98:
Things can only get better
and better! 5/5/98:
Racial, ethnic, national barriers disappearing5/5/98:
Racial, ethnic, national barriers disappearing4/21/98: A terrifying synthesis of forces spawned Pol Pot's regime4/19/98: Russian-German-French structure of consultation is good development4/16/98: Violence in society comes from the top as well as the bottom 4/13/98: Clinton's foreign policy does have a sunny side, too 4/8/98: Public interest must control marketplace 4/5/98: Great crimes don't require great villians 3/29/98: Authority rests on a moral position, and requires consent3/29/98:Signs of hope in troubled Russia 3/25/98: National Front amassing power3/23/98: NATO's expansion contradicts other American policies3/18/98: The New Yorker sought money, but lost it3/16/98: America's 'strategy of tension' in Italy3/13/98: Slobodan Milosevic may have started something that can't be stopped